Much of the best recent scholarship on conservative Protestantism in the middle decades of this Century focuses on what is sometimes called the “mainstream” of interdenominational evangelicalism. Although this variety of evangelicalism was deeply influenced by and, indeed, in some respects the direct successor to the fundamentalist movement of the 1910's, 1920's, and 1930's, it did not begin to assume its present shape until the early 1940's. The formation of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 is a convenient symbol of the emergence of what we now think of as constituting the evangelical mainstream.

Drafting a perfect definition of this mainstream is impossible; drafting a good working description of it is not. In the present context, “evangelical mainstream” simply refers to that network of born-again Christians associated with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, and Campus Crusade for Christ; with schools such as the Moody Bible Institute, Füller Seminary, and Wheaton College; with publishing firms like Eerdman's and Zondervan; and with magazines such as Christianity Today, Eternity, and Moody Monthly.

Ellen G. White, nee Harmon (1827-1915), is among the least known of the prophet-founders of major American religious movements. The Seventh-day Adventist prophet has received neither the celebrity nor the notoriety of Mormonism’s Joseph Smith, Shakerism’s Ann Lee, or Christian Science’s Mary Baker Eddy. Yet she deserves at least the recognition of these other sect founders. Ill, introverted, and undereducated, White ultimately asserted the most forceful influence on Seventh-day Adventism and ensured it a place among the major American sects. Her long and resourceful career as the Adventist visionary inspired the transformation of a single-minded, other-worldly, Millerite off-shoot into a complex and established denomination with wide-ranging interests in sabbatarianism, eschatology, health reform, temperance, medicine, child nurture, education, and religious liberty. Her legacy includes an impressive global network of sanitariums and hospitals and a vast educational system unparalleled in contemporary Protestantism. Her writings number eighty printed volumes, circulated among an Adventist world membership of over five million.

In his early writing on language, truth, and art, Nietzsche notes that art “treats illusion as illusion; therefore it does not wish to deceive; it is true.” Insofar as art is an illusion whose only truth is that it is illusion, art is only true as a lie. When the illusion of art is mistaken for truth, art is destroyed. Nietzsche's observations about the truth of a work of art are instructive when considering the questions raised by postmodern artworks such as Blue Velvet, a film written and directed by David Lynch.

As Lynch explores the consequences of mistaking illusion for truth in Blue Velvet, he offers a disquieting analysis of the American Dream, its icons, and the cultural idolatry that sustains it. With a degree of suspicion characteristic of postmodern interpretative strategies, Lynch examines the values that define the “American Way of Life” and provides evidence to challenge the truth claim of traditional notions of good and evil.

Northern Protestant leaders are commonly portrayed as uncritical scions of a cultural Obsession with “progress” that reached high tide in the two decades before the Civil War. Convinced that the United States held a divinely appointed commission to usher in Christ's millennial Kingdom on Earth, ministers supposedly sanctioned the nation's material and political development as integral to spiritual advancement. While they served their American flock a füll portion of Christian moralism to sustain this collective destiny, only a few renegade naysayers—such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne—remained sensible to human limitations and challenged a pervasive clerical frenzy of “progressivism, bravado and boasting.” Mainstream Protestantism's accommodative spirit, in other words, dulled its “critical edge” and rendered its message subservient to what one scholar calls a “nationwide ritual of progress.”

One of the more consistent characterizations of both American Fundamentalism and other versions of conservative Evangelicalism is that these groups represent authoritarian religious and social systems. Such characterizations are not entirely without some basis in fact. Fundamentalism will almost always appear authoritarian, and so too will forms of Pentecostalism which, like Fundamentalism, place a heavy emphasis on correct thinking and combine a belief in the infallibility of scripture with a commitment to literal readings. Outsiders are sometimes disconcerted to find that “authoritarian” and related concepts are not assessed negatively in conservative Evangelical circles. Quite the contrary is the case: the Bible, infallible, inerrant, “God-breathed,” is the clear center of Evangelical authority. Many a Fundamentalist sermon has sought to clinch its case with the phrase, “on authority of the holy Word of God.”

In 1643, twelve years after his arrival in Massachusetts Bay, John Eliot (1604-90), the Roxbury clergyman better known as the “Apostle to the Indians,” began to learn an Algonquian dialect in preparation for missionary work. After three years of study, he started to preach to the Indians in the colony. He continued to labor among them until the late 1680's, when his infirmity no longer permitted him to leave Roxbury. Over the course of these forty years, he attracted some eleven hundred Indians to the Christian faith, established fourteen reservations (“praying towns”) for his proselytes, and produced for Indians' use a number of Algonquian language works, including a translation of the Bible.

During the past twenty-five years, Eliot's career has received considerable scholarly attention. In 1965 Alden Vaughan portrayed Eliot as a conscientious missionary whose objective was to spread “Christian civilization” among the Indians.

The Christian church, including all its various branches, has been consistently susceptible to the forces that form or change cultures. Scholars claim that this adaptability has been extremely important in the rise and spread of the religion. In the American environment, Protestants formed voluntary associations that attracted people individually and by family groups. This environment actually shaped “denominations” even during the colonial period. One such denomination was the Presbyterians, who pioneered in the formation of a communion that existed as neither a “state church” nor a “dissenting” church body. As the United States experienced industrialization and growing complexity in economic and cultural patterns, the Protestant denominations were affected by those same forces. Thus, denominations naturally became what came to be termed “non-profit corporations,” subject to the limitations and problems of such organizations but also the beneficiaries of that system as well.